


By Starlight

by Strawberrybats



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen, implied Sumia/Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 10:46:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14134467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strawberrybats/pseuds/Strawberrybats
Summary: "She betrayed us - stole you from your crib, and fled with you in the night!"Her loyalty has always been pledged for her, in one way or another - born to further Grima's line, raised and used to further Validar's plans. For the first time in her life, she has chosen who and what she will devote herself to.She takes Robin up in her arms and runs, as far from the Dragon's Table as she can.





	By Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> ive loved awakening for eons but never actually published fic for the game and so, naturally, once i decided to fix that i opted to write a fic about a character that gets mentioned one time with no name ! I know Just What the people want B)
> 
> lmfao for real though I just got curious about the unnamed mother, who apparently cared enough to spirit Robin away, and it set my mind working on this fic! I always kind of wondered what Robin's life must have been like in the first timeline, before the events of the game and becoming an amnesiac. So I used that as a springboard for the fic and tried to scrape up an idea of what Robin's past, and caretaker, might have been like. Thanks for reading!

The walls of the sanctum, high and dark and insurmountable in their foundations, are all she has ever known. She’s no fool - there’s enough information to work with to know that there is something beyond the doors here, a taste of air so hot it makes her feel like melting and flying all at once; because anything that isn’t the musky smell of books and ritual preparations is new and exciting to her, a glimpse at something outside the dark tomb called home.

Blinding, almost beckoning light lies beyond the thick stone doors, but the priests have made it apparent that no outer life is for her; she is to stay within the chambers and devote herself further to Grima in hopes that her blood will become purer and more potent in its dark energies. While the other maidens are free to track sand into the sanctum and go as they please, bar important ceremonies, she will always remain, watching.

She has lived a thoroughly uneventful life here, and that will all change today.

Validar is a tall man with eyes like soot and an even blacker heart: she is surprised he was not fitting enough to be the heir of destruction itself and that Grima demanded one of still darker lineage. This is where her purpose lies. Devote herself to Grima. Devote herself to Validar. In one way or another, her allegiance has always been pledged for her, by other people, so when Validar takes the whittling knife to her arm and siphons the darkness from her blood to check its richness, she does not flinch.

When Validar comes to her chambers on the eve of her 16th birthday, she does not say a word, and devotes herself to Grima still further, from some terribly detached place where she cannot draw her eyes away from the open door and the many, many eyes of Grima that lie just outside it.

Time passes. The world that is her sanctuary grows ever smaller around her, but her eyes are too glazed to take note of it.

She didn’t take with a child until after several attempts (she’s grateful that the visits are scarce, since he has duties advising the Plegian king), and already the priests mulled over this and that, the best way to ensure this vessel was The One. The whole business seemed kind of shoddy to her, but if they wanted to chant and paint images of destruction upon the growth in her womb, then who was she to stop them?

Have the child, lose value, and be allowed to leave in hopes of one less mouth to feed with their ever-dwindling food supply. This future is what she has committed herself to. A dim place in her mind, so faint it feels it could flicker out at any moment, has always wanted that freedom.

The plan is torn to pieces on the night of the birth, when Validar sits across from her with hawkish posture and a decidedly un-charming smile and the midwife deposits their child onto her chest still bloodied and coughing, and she feels the feather-soft skin pressed into her hands, clasped around the squirming body.

By the time Validar plucks his prize from her hands, she is already planning her methods of retrieval.

 _Robin_. Robin. They’ve named her little girl without asking her - she will have to bear this indignity, but even the name chosen without her while she was recovering is something she has come to love. She thinks the infant child would make a better dove than a robin, a perfect angel of curly white hair like moonlight and skin as smooth and dark as hers, rather than the patchy grey of Validar.

Still swathed in her blanket, and unable to crawl, Robin has captured her soul entirely.

For possibly the first time in her life, she has chosen who and what she will devote herself to. In the library chambers where she once knelt and prayed for Grima to deliver them all, she sits and asks if Naga has enough love in her heart to hear the pleas of someone like her.

Luckily her body is still a necessity for Robin - as long as she is her only source of food, they will allow her to hold her baby close to herself and mutter as much as she would like, so long as the Future Avatar Of Grima is kept alive and satiated by her breast. This in mind, she has quite the length of time to begin her planning: at the age of one year they intend to wean Robin off her, and she has no doubt her child will go to live with Validar in the Plegian palace by then. She doesn’t care to find out if she is invited to come along also - and even if she is, she has not much cared for Validar since their introduction to each other.

She learns the watch shifts.

She learns the door’s mechanism.

She learns that the sun is hotter than she first imagined, and others wear veils and cloaks to avoid direct exposure.

She learns more. She learns faster.

By the year’s end, she learns the feel of hot sand beneath her feet and the icy chill of the night through stolen ceremonial robes and spare blankets. But she has left the enclave, and only stops to look once, searchingly, as the walls that once seemed so high vanished on the horizon. A thousand bright eyes in the heavens bear down on her, but not one possesses the judgmental disposition of Grima's eyes. They must be something else.

Robin wails, muffled in her wrappings, and she kisses her to sleep.

There’s not much out in the great wide world for her, big as it may be. When the sands and the sun grow too hot to bear and she fears her days with Robin may be coming to an end, and Robin hasn’t cried in a suspiciously long time, they find an oasis and, by some stroke of divine luck, a woman takes them into her own home with a cackle and introduces herself as a dark mage and Local Crazy Woman.

Crazy or not, dark mage or otherwise, she gives them canteens and a place to rest their heads.

“A good deed ensures my own childbirthing will go well, of course,” The woman says, matter of factly, as if there is no other reason to do so. “The fates will be very pleased with this one, yes. Perhaps my child will grow to seek yours out. Perhaps not. Take these.”

The woman palms two bone and feather talismans into her hands, and all but shoves her out the door the next morning. She has time to notice the look of the tomes on her cabinet before she leaves, and resolves that this must be her next plan. She must grow strong enough to protect Robin - and strong enough to have a use in the next city she stumbles across.

She conspires to steal. Hiding near the oasis, the next group of grimleal she sees - and she feels nothing for taking from them, taking from them as they have taken and taken and taken from her in the past - fall prey to her pit trap. Taking their tomes and supplies is simple, and all it takes is a firm thwack over the head with a tree branch to knock them unconscious.

Tome in hand, she stands over the men she has caught off guard and wonders if it would be cruel to end them all here.

Remembering Robin in her hiding place, her mouth twists into a grim frown, and she casts the spell Nosferatu. She watches as their essence is stripped away in a haze of purple smoke and gifted to her.

They’ve died to further the avatar of Grima, after all. What could be more noble than that? She scoops Robin up in her arms and makes her way across the sands faster than ever before, hand shaking all the while.

They cannot be discovered, even if it means she must take the lives of her pursuers.

Living in the desert is not as hard as one might expect. As long as she can eat, Robin can still be fed, at least for now, though she’s begun mixing solids into her diet. They can’t stay in any given village too long, though - Validar has his men searching for her, and the Grimleal are relentless in their pursuit. Sooner or later, she knows, they will find and overwhelm her with numbers - she will have to take flight somewhere else.

The only country near enough to flee into is Ylisse, but can she really raise her child in the country that would slaughter them? The war-mongering king of that nation has made his distaste for hers clear. Would she even be allowed across the border? Who would she speak with? She resolves to learn the language and try anyways, and tries to brighten her mood by offering her finger up to Robin to grip with her small hands. Her grip has gotten so much stronger in these short months...

Her daughter garbles her way through the word “Mama”, and her heart melts. By the oasis of the next town they discover, she tries her best to teach her more.

Robin is two and a half years old when they begin the journey east. Sometimes she still has to be carried when she grows tired, but she doesn’t mind slowing down to let her child stumble along the sand with her. She’s come to adore those hot nights where they sit beneath the shade of trees and try to learn their words together; Ylissian is hard but not as difficult as she’d first thought. She tries to keep her pronunciation good for Robin’s sake, which makes the task seem worthwhile.

One such night, a pack of Grimleal find them and interrupt their lessons with an assault. A bolt of lightning sears a deep slice out of her arm, but it’s the only one they had the luxury of sending her way. She has memorized the words and placement of her tome, and three men crumple before her by the night’s end. While she cleans off her wound - because Nosferatu can heal, but not remove the evidence of the injury - Robin crawls out of her hidey-hole and pulls up next to her, sitting on her feet. She asks for more words, so they resume the lesson.

Time seems to pass faster the closer they get to the edge of the continent. Robin is a year older and speaks in almost-sentences, chattering endlessly about whatever they happen to walk by.

She wishes, not for the first time, that they could settle down, for Robin to make some friends her own age - she wishes, not for the first time, that her toddler had not become so well acquainted with _death_.

Even in spite of such wishes, they march ever-closer to Ylisse, and her will cannot be shaken. She will enter Ylisse. She will avoid death. They can still salvage something yet.

Though she keeps Nosferatu in her back pocket, she has picked up a thunder tome now, after they passed a mage in the city wielding one and Robin seemed to be enamoured by the lights and arcing energy. At night she makes stars for the two of them, and Robin laughs like a child her age ought to. Maybe some things can be saved.

The border crossing. It's an entirely new beast to face, one she knows she cannot skirt around or fight off with tome or sword. She tries to approach the guard slowly, to ensure they can see Robin, to look non-threatening, to avoid violence.

“State your business,” The woman says first, lance readied.

“Please,” is the first word out of her mouth. Robin tucks herself a bit behind her mother, nervously. The border guard doesn’t seem moved but she continues. “The war is...present.” She says. “Plegia is a desert. I have a child. Please.” She repeats. “I want to cross and make a home.”

“You’re a Grimleal.” The guard points out, looking supremely uncomfortable. “I can’t bloody well let the enemy across the border.”

“I’ll convert!” She exclaims, loud enough for Robin to curl in closer. “I have no other clothes, but please. Let me cross this border. I will convert, I will go to Naga’s church, my child will not know Grima. Please.” She repeats.

The guard bites her lip, but ultimately shakes her head. “I...can’t. We’re in a war. I get it, I do....but you should head home. Ylisse wouldn't be a welcoming place to set up for you and your tyke anyway.”

“Please...” She repeats lamely.

They do not cross the border that day.

The string of cities near the Plegian-Ylissean border have been torn to hell during the battles. Most residents are new and displaced like herself, and few Grimleal survive. All of them seem to have renounced Grima by this rate, which she supposes is a sign they lacked faith in the first place. Nobody who prays for death would convert when faced with it. Why can't they see that? They didn't choose this. Her countrymen didn't choose this.

It matters not. Robin is six, learning faster than ever, and she has eagerly taken to playing with any wooden swords her mother can procure. She would never allow her sweet daughter to fight for real, of course, not now, in any case- but her form is important to work on. Now it is sloppy, amateurish, but years later it will be splendid. She is supervising play, and nothing more.

They stay here for somewhat longer than any other town they’ve inhabited, and the Ylissian army is a good method of scaring away Validar’s men, at least for now, while they are assuming she wouldn’t dare rest her head so close to the lion’s den. It doesn’t matter how often they come in, the citizens here are used to it. Lock the doors, pray they interrogate you first and attack second, and try to speak their language clearly.

Besides - somehow, against all odds, Robin is unafraid of them. When she’s seven, she manages to strike up a conversation with a guard and take a few lessons in Ylissian.

Robin has always had a bit of a gift for befriending people, no matter how different their personalities might be. She’s certain it will help her later in life, but for now she’s just a young girl that gets along well with her neighbors.

Her child beams the entire way back to their house, something they’ve....well, sort of just taken, after the prior residents were forced out.

It’s not as though they don’t pay rent; like any rational adult she has tried to find a way to improve her situation, and offers her knowledge as a tutor to the others in town. It’s a good way of brushing up on her own skills while getting some payment (mostly in the form of items). She teaches magic, swordplay, and Ylissian. Most of her pupils are adults, but they behave.

“Are we still going to move, mother?” Robin asks one day, swinging their arms where they are holding hands.

She looks down - though not as much as she used to, Robin is growing fast - and smiles. “It will take time. But I believe there’s something better for us there.”

Robin seems to take a moment to concentrate very hard. “...I don’t think here is bad.” She says quietly.

“It’s a good life, little one.” She admits. “But we must travel further if we want to avoid...” She holds her tongue. She still hasn’t told Robin why they move so frequently, and isn’t sure she’d like to tell her now. If she can go her entire life without knowing of Validar....that will be for the best. “...the people who would harm us.”

Her child squints up at her. “We’re going _there_ ,” She gestures to Ylisse’s border, in the distance, “To be safer?”

She laughs. “It does seem rather contradictory when you put it that way. But yes.”

“What’s contradictory mean?”

“Hmm...when two things shouldn’t be able to both be true at once.” She settles on saying, since they’ll no doubt look it up when they get to the house anyway. She swings their arms together a little more, and thinks that the war cannot end fast enough.

When Robin is eight, the Bastard King of the east dies, leaving his oldest child to deal with the consequences of his terrible war. She hears the girl is barely even ten.

It stirs some sympathy in her heart, but more than anything she hopes that this means the war will be over.

Later that year, their house is found. The Grimleal creep in at night, cowards that they are, and try to pull Robin from their bed. Sleeping in a building has made her lax - her tome is not under her pillow, but beside her nightstand. Robin is screaming, although the Grimleal wouldn’t dare hurt their heir, and she has to search frantically for her tome. It’s moved, they moved it - She cries out when one of them manages to strike her with the ruin spell.

Time is brief. She scrambles for where she knows her sword is, hidden below the bed - she kicks it out so she doesn’t have to crouch and then dives on it, hoping the movement will help her evade a spell. She was right - a fire spell was cast and the bed ignited.

With a grimace, she can see that she is in the range of two people, and striking one will leave her open to the other. She chooses to move towards the one nearing the door and cut him down where he stands, tearing into him with the sword and managing to disarm him (by removing his arm). Thunder glances off her back. The fire spreads, consuming their house of three years.

She can’t take too much more, but she won’t die here. The fire from the bed spreads. The man holding Robin while she tries to squirm out of his grasp is focused too much on her - she strikes at his backside and feels something in the spine give out.

Robin runs to her and clings tightly to her jacket, but they need to get out - now. Fearing the Grimleal will be waiting for them outside the door, she takes her earnings from the nightstand, finds a place the fire has eaten away too much of the wood, kicks it down, and _runs_.

They are not there to see the village’s reaction to the ashes of their house.

Robin sniffles and coughs the whole way to the next village they will try to settle within. They’ll no doubt have to have a talk about this later, but for now, it is enough to hold her hand and mumble apologies.

Two years later the Ylissian army has completely withdrawn from Plegia. Robin has learned that they are being pursued, though not _why_ , and is ready to move with her mother as soon as the border has been reopened. There are few Plegians eager to move out of their own country, but that doesn’t mean there are none - after a few hours of talking and explaining her intentions to the border guard she and Robin are allowed to settle in small town in Ylisse a week after.

Now ten, and sharper than even her mother could have expected, Robin is beginning to have a more broad perception of the world around her. She sees the place they’ve moved to, and rather than asking why they’ve moved, looks appreciatively up at her mother. “We’ll be safe from them here,” she states, as though it’s fact, then scopes out their little cut of life - the small house they’d wheedled and saved and made promises to pay back, a messy thing without a doorhinge, and crosses her arm. “Our house is seriously ugly, though.”

“That sounds like a personal problem. I think it’s quaint.” She laughs, and when Robin stamps her foot and proclaims that she’ll fix it up herself if she has to, she pats her head. “Hold your pegasi, Robin. I promise, it will all work out in the end.”

Of course, that’s a bit of a white lie. There’s no way of telling what the future holds, or indeed even if they’re safe here. Certainly, relocating to Ylisse, outside the bounds of Validar’s political influence, will be a deterrent, but they ran from the wolf’s maw into the lion’s - Ylisse itself, for all the improvements toward peace it has made in the past short years, is an unfathomably difficult place to live. She heard the crown princess herself - now the ruler, the Exalt - has been put into bedrest over an injury sustained walking among her people.

If that is how the princess, in her guarded tower, must live her life, then the situation they live in is a fate more precarious than she’d like.

Still, she always has the energy for a smile when she returns home. Robin takes her out to look at the sky at night, and she remembers those nights in the sanctum, lonely and starless, and feels that there is no hardship she would not endure to stay here.

The world around her home is spacious and dark and exhilarating. Robin has lived her entire life in it - all of it - and the chains of captivity will never reach her, here. Not Validar’s. Not the Exalt’s. Nor even her own, even if someday she were to jealously attempt to keep her dear Robin from leaving the nest. “Do you have a favorite star, Robin?”

“No,” Comes the quick answer, in a thoughtful inflection. “I think they’re all pretty.” She turns over onto her side, curious eyes fixed on her mother, head cocked. “What are they made of, you think? Someone at school told me, ‘stars are people who’ve died, but still watch over us’, but he’s wrong.” She says it with a long-suffering sigh, the sense of exasperation. “Blood is what happens when somebody dies. But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

She hums, thoughtfully. Perhaps that is a part of the teachings of Naga, something she is woefully uneducated about, even to this day. In the teachings of Grima, death is death, and death is perfection. The void of existence, the thought that immortality exists only in bursts, in the submission to cycles. But in Naga’s teachings, they want to believe that life does not end.

In a way it’s interesting, but in other ways it’s sad. Still, this is a question that Robin thinks is important, and so she will strive to answer it with the diligence it requires.

“What do you want the stars to be, Robin?”

Her face scrunches up. “I don’t want them to be anything, I just want to know what they _are_ , Mother.”

Another hum. “Will knowing what they are make them more beautiful?” She asks, turning her own head to the stars.

“Well -” A pause; Robin pulls a face. “I _guess_ not.” She admits, with some reluctance. “But I still want to know.”

The sky twinkles above the pair. “I suppose...” She starts with a hum, drumming her fingers on the ground. “I suppose I don’t know how to answer you, then. Whether they’re the souls of the departed or not, they make me happy.”

“Ugh,” Robin groans. “What a lazy answer! Mother, don’t you know everything?”

“Painfully little, compared to you. Come on, now. If we stay out longer we’ll catch cold.”

“How do you know _that_ but not what stars are, huh?!”

She laughs.

Time escapes them both. By the time Robin is a teenager, thirteen years of age, they go out stargazing less. Go out everything less. That’s not to say they’ve become distant, or no longer spend time together - only that Robin has other things on her mind, and that she herself has become busier with work. She teaches, yet again, since it’s the one thing in the world she’s always had a knack for. Drawing, strategy, swordplay, magic, all of these things.

Robin spends much of her time reading, dangling her legs from the rooftop, leaning back against the thatched roof. She says it’s the only way she gets enough sun for the day without interrupting her readings. Such a silly child...

“Robin! Come in, it’s getting late!”

She’s set the table already, even though it’s usually Robin’s job. The girl seems to be in a peculiar mood today, thoughtful and subdued. She sits in her place and looks at her hands, drumming her fingers on the table. Her gloves are off.

When Robin fails to say anything, she prompts her first. “Did you do anything interesting today?”

Still, the girl is silent. She does look up, though - she seems to try to work the question out in her mind before she’ll ask it, and so she gives her daughter the time to do so. “Mother...” She starts, slowly, “Why do I...”

Robin pauses, then pursues the question. “Why do I have the mark of Grima on my hand? I know who that is, you know. Nothing good. I’ve had it forever, too. Did you get it tattooed on or something?”

Ah, the dreaded question. She’s been dodging this for ages, now, always telling Robin she’ll learn when she’s older, or citing her ignorance of Grima as an excuse. If Robin has already found a book here in Ylisse detailing the dragon of the end times, then it seems she can’t put it off much longer. It’s only a matter of time before she gets someone’s attention with her prodding.

So she’ll tell the truth - part of it.

She sets her utensils down by her plate, acknowledging that her food would likely cool by the time they finished. “The mark was...your father’s doing. He was a very devout man. He’d hoped you would be the same.”

“He was devoted to _Grima?!_ ” Robin repeats, clenching her fists atop the table. She’s holding onto the corner. “That’s crazy! We’re talking about the same god, right?”

She sighs. “Robin, you must understand. Many in Plegia are raised their entire lives for that purpose. I was one such person. When you’re born into it, it becomes difficult to imagine any other way of living.”

“But why start in the _first place?!_ ” In clear disagreement, Robin folds her arms over her chest. “Grima _killed people_ . A _lot_ of them. Whose dumb idea was it to worship that?”

“I have no way of knowing. In truth, even though I was once devout, I can’t recall ever feeling strongly, one way or another, about the deity.” She admits. It’s been a long time since she thought about it - thought about those days, the first half of her life, the place she was born into, raised in, and fled. Even though she knows the terrible truth of her old world, a part of her aches. Had she no friends? No fond memories? How did it take this long - how did it take nearly thirteen years for it to catch up with her?

She’s been busy, that much is true. Closing her eyes, she determines that it’s best not to focus on it. Not now, anyway.

“The Grimleal are...pessimists. Grima is a god that loathes humanity, and those who worship Grima feel much the same. I lived in a group not far from Castle Plegia, under the Dragon’s Table, and they were all trying to...revive, the Fell One. So that they could end the world.”

Robin’s eyes look ready to pop out of their sockets. “Wouldn’t they die too?”

“Yes.” She says simply, and it’s the first time in the conversation she’s been able to give a concrete answer. “They would all die. They already sacrifice members routinely. Death is no small object - in the service of Grima, the Grimleal consider it a blessing and an accomplishment.”

“But...but...” Stammering, Robin’s protests drop to a whisper. “Why...?”

“For them, life is not beautiful. They see a wasteland - death, hypocrisy, blood. That is what makes up the earth the Grimleal inhabit. That is what they see when they look out on a clear night.” As she speaks, she keeps her eyes trained on Robin. What a lifetime ago it all seems - thirteen years, and she’s nearly forgotten the entire seventeen beforehand. Can she really remember what she’d thought, back then? When she was loyal?

She tries to summon them, but the feelings from those days won’t return; the blind loyalty, her passiveness… It would seem she grew out of those things.

“Everything is fated to end. This I still believe. But I can no longer accept the hastening of that end.” Reaching over the table, she clasps Robin’s hand in her own. She runs her thumb over the mark. It won’t ever go away, but if luck is with her, it will never give Robin trouble. “You have no obligations to the Grimleal, or your father.”

Would Validar have tried to perform the ceremony already? It’s thrilling, in a sense, knowing that she has averted the destiny she was born to fulfill. A prank, on the cosmic scale. If Grima could see her now, would they be furious? The six eyes of the underworld, all burning with rage at the sight of her.  

She doesn’t care where she goes when she dies, but gods, does it feel good to have spited Grima in life.

Robin goes quiet again, and thinks up another question, rolled less tentatively this time. “What was my father like? Is he dead?”

“If rumors are to believed he is a brilliant man, but to me he will never be more than a cruel one. He still lives.”

“...Were you married?” She asks, in a meek voice.

“No.” Understanding the line of questioning, she goes on to reassure the girl. “I never loved him, Robin, but I have always loved you. Please, do not confuse the two.”

Sniffling, Robin rubs at her eyes, pulling her hands away. “Thanks... We should eat.”

Even though Robin has told her a hundred times she’s far too old for it, the two share the bed that night, and Robin snores the whole night through, apparently at ease despite their conversation today. Amused, she takes the time to enjoy Robin’s flustered protest when she wakes her up, cooing at her as if she were still a small girl.

Fourteen sees Robin learn her first magic - _real_ magic, the dangerous sort, crackling arcthunder between her fingertips, threatening to leap if uncontrolled. Until this point she has had some experience, but only the paltry sort of magic one can summon without a tome. Fairy-like sparkles, dissipating before they truly get far from the hand.

She tries to teach Robin use this magic with discipline - perfect control. She still wants to goof off with it, though. After a bout of lightning-juggling destroys a potted plant and nearly sets the backside of their house alight, she agrees to simmer down a bit. “Never point a spell at something you are not prepared to destroy,” she warns, with probably the most severe tone she’s ever managed with her daughter. “It may be fun, but it is dangerous. Pay close attention, now. As long as you keep the spell in the base of your palm you should be able to avoid shocking things you don’t want to.”

Concentrating deeply, Robin curls her fingers around her palm, like making her hand into a claw will restrain the lightning physically, but eventually the sparks settle in a rather stable manner on her hand, arcing straight up like a hilltop. “Like that, right?”

She nods, taking Robin’s arm in her own and laying her own hand beneath hers. “Magic in this form is powerful and easy to control, at the cost of the very short range. It’s good for practicing. When you’re older and more advanced, you should even be able to manipulate the strength of the lightning.”

“Hey! I think I’m pretty adv - AAAH!” The moment she takes her eyes off the lightning, a bolt goes flying into the earth, leaving a scorched pit in its wake. Robin lowers her head, if only to escape her mother’s knowing look. “Okay, fine...” She mutters.

Advanced magic will have to wait some time. Swordplay comes next. Admittedly she herself has used less and less of it in the past years, relying more on magic for the sheer convenience of it all - but the use of a good, sturdy blade isn’t to be underestimated, especially against an axe. Though she worries about her safety, she thinks Robin is old enough to have a bronze training sword. A heavy, near blunted thing - capable of harming, but unlikely to do so on accident.

Robin takes well to it, although she’s a bit more distracted than she had been during the magic lessons. To stave off disaster, she decides to ask what’s wrong before a blade gets dropped on anyone’s foot. “Is something on your mind?”

“Who am I supposed to fight when I’m better at this kind of thing...? Is... is Validar still coming after us?”

“I can’t deny the possibility, although I think it will be some time yet before he discovers us, let alone tries to catch us. His sphere of influence in Ylisse is very small. But he is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.” It’s dismissive, really, the offhand way she excuses Validar as a threat.

What had once been fear has developed into disdain: who is he to enter her thoughts when he is not present? Even to worry about an attack is a disservice. She prepares, obviously, in case an attack _is_ launched, but the greatest pleasure in escaping is having blissful days where danger does not cross her mind. “I just teach you because it’s practical to know.”

Robin’s mouth is still twisted into a small frown. “I just...want to know if I’m going to have to kill anyone.” ‘ _Like you have.’_ remains unsaid. This is one of those times their pernicious past has risen up to bite them both, like a mighty and confused animal, lashing out. The death, the fire, flashes of steel. Axes and Nosferatu tomes. Both of them are quiet, like the memory has to be shared or it won’t come to mind.

“I think you understand now,” she says gently, finally, after a prolonged, meek silence. “Why I did the things I did. You’re old enough to know life has value, and so I’ve chosen now to teach you to fight. It is better to learn your weapons well now than to learn them in the midst of battle.”

This answer seems to be accepted, so Robin draws her blade again and redoubles her efforts to learn it, or at least swing it in a more controlled manner. Right now it seems more like the sword is swinging her.

Two more years passed her by, and they’ve been good. Apart from the occasional accusation of working with the bandits endlessly streaming into the western towns, all quickly dispelled by her own students and Robin’s endless supply of alibis, life has been peaceful, too. King Gangrel sends men in all the time to infiltrate, but Exalt Emmeryn refuses to rise to the bait. The citizens, following her lead, are more gracious than they had once been, and cities prosper as sanctuaries, schools and libraries rise around them.

She takes Robin to the capital, so she might see the way the nation works. She’s taken an interest in politics, as of late, although it isn’t a surprise. Robin has already read so much, learned so many things - how to tell this plant from the other, the proper methods of curry cooking, geology, and chess strategy - her desire for information has far surpassed her mother’s.

So, as a birthday gift, they go to the city. Robin gushes about the pegasus knights especially, raising an arm to point skyward at them as if, rather than a grown woman of seventeen, she is a young one again. “They say the knights and their pegasi are so attentive to each other that both will cry out if one is hit,” she says eagerly, with a wild gesture to the skybound animals. “And that the rider can get the pegasus to change altitudes without even saying a word!”

And then a long, somewhat suffering sigh. “And they’re so gorgeous up there, mother. The wind in their hair, the graceful feathers of their mount, the freedom...doesn’t it just make your head spin? I wish animals liked me a little more, then I’d have signed up for sure.”

She grins, a bit wryly. “Don’t be so certain it’s only the glamorous lifestyle you seek. You were looking at Captain Phila like she was the last oasis in all of a Plegian Desert.”

“M-mother!” Robin sputters, immediately shoving the woman away from herself. Ironically it draws more attention to the two, and she lowers her head in mortification. “You can’t just - I mean - I was _not_ ,”

With a raucous laugh, she lets Robin cart her off someplace a little more subdued before she makes way for the library by the castle, insisting on space and quiet, and _most certainly not_ investigating the romance section of the place.

Whatever she says. While she’s there, though, she picks up a book or two of her own to read before they depart for their home near Southtown.

It’s a good couple of years. Cobbling memories together, one at a time, stringing them along at a good pace. It’s hard to imagine she’s as old as she is, now - hard to remember the days she thought she’d die at sixteen, seventeen. Her daughter is older than she was when she’d given birth to her. Her daughter is older than she was when they’d fled together, off into the desert.

They have a cat, a fat orange thing that sleeps more than it moves. Robin is old enough to have left the nest, but she stays. Part of her feels a guilty responsibility for that - would she have moved on, closer to the capital, made more friends, learned more, experienced more, if her mother were more social? She’s kind hearted, but she’s never had the gift of speaking to others quite like Robin. As the other parents in her area grow old and knit together, she is still too young, too different, too grave with her words, to have made old knitting friends of her own.

Part of her feels guilty knowing Robin wouldn’t move even if she wanted to, for fear of leaving her lonely, even with the orange cat.

So Robin stays on, and they keep a close family, just the two of them.

All things are destined to end someday. She’s known that since birth.

So when, for the first time in years, she wakes to the smell of a burning building, hears the shouts of the Grimleal in the haze, she knows the end of this type of life is soon to come. She stands, and grabs her tome, the bursting energy of her most rare spell sparking to life at her fingertips.

Her grip goes white around the _Book of Naga_ , a wind magic to transcend all armor, and she thinks of the hysterical irony of it all, the mother of a girl born to be the Fell One wielding such magic, before unleashing a gale that tears the side of her home down and takes a soldier with it.

Robin is outside with her arcthunder in a panic. “Th-they’re everywhere...half the town is already ablaze, and reinforcements are coming every moment...” She sees it all too clearly, as if from some detached place above it all. They’re blocking every way out. Thinnest to the south, though, she needs to capitalize on that. Reinforcements are coming from the north, so the bulk of their fighting force must be from the northwest. There’s a hill there, so with any luck it will take time to call upon more than they have already here...

She closes her eyes. “Have you seen any of the neighbors?”

“N-no...gods, they can’t be dead already, can they...?” Robin mutters, looking at the wreckage. “The incursion just started!”

She summons a lethal gale in her hand again, shouting the words inscribed in her tome and tearing through two soldiers to the left of them. The bulk of the fighting force is that way. “Do you see the battlefield, Robin? Picture it the way the tactician’s guide taught you. Look south.”

“We can’t just _run_ \- what about the town? What about - ?!” Robin’s words stop, all at once, when she removes her cloak and throws it across her, leaving herself nearly bare in her white undershirt, and certainly easier to spy in the darkened night.

“Put it on and make for the southern border. Get as far away from this place as possible, and try to stay out of their striking distance. Fight the three men guarding the exit at range; with your tome it will only take one strike to kill them each and you will only risk one counterattack. Keep moving when you pass them and seek shelter in a more crowded city when you can.”

Robin’s eyes go wider. She knows that her beautiful, sweet daughter understands what she’s saying. She’s no fool. Nor is she willing to accept this plan. “You can’t be serious! Mother, I won’t - I can’t! If you’re going to try and save the village, I’m fighting with you too!”

“Validar is coming, Robin.” She can feel it, the damnable man, even now. His blackened rot encroaching on their _home_ like a pestilence, poisoning all it grows near. “He cannot be allowed to find you. For everyone’s sake.”

Robin stamps her foot, hard, loosing a spiraling bolt of lightning from her readied hand, although it hits the ground harmlessly. A tempermental flare. “I don’t care! I’ll take him on!”

Ah, so it’s come to this. Perhaps she should have told her the truth earlier. She looks at her, one more time, maybe the last - and brings her close, hot tears sliding down her face.

She tells her the truth.

Robin shakes like a newborn lamb, and she’s never looked so fragile, not even as an infant. The moon shines down condescendingly upon the two. “You need to run now. We do not have the luxury of selfishness, you and I... If you fall to him here, this wonderful planet may just stop spinning for good. So please, Robin...just...do as I ask...” She loses her composure, finally, the dam that has been welling up for twenty odd years splitting at the seams, but she doesn’t sob.

Robin does a fine job of crying enough for the both of them, anyhow. “Y-you’re not going to die, okay? I’m going to the capital. Wh-when you’re not dead, and they lose your trail, then - !”

She smiles, a slow, melancholy look, and decides the fantasies of grief are best left alone. She plays along. “I’ll meet you in the library,” She whispers, a light hand on her shoulder. “I’ll find you in the starlight. Anywhere. We aren’t parting ways here, dear one... You’re just going to have to take the lead from now on, okay?”

The weight of the statement isn’t lost on her. They’re both fully aware this place will be her grave, and a shallow, unburied one at that. Robin collapses into a sobbing heap, and it’s all she can do to stave off the incoming Plegians while she composes herself. One hand on a tome, and the other at her back...

They both stiffen when Validar takes the field, leagues stronger than his minions, and the time finally has to come when she says goodbye for real. “Be brave for me, darling bird. There’s so much left for you out there.”

Robin’s eyes, red-rimmed and watery and burning with determination, say it all. “I love you. Goodbye.”

“And I, you. Goodbye.”

They stride off in opposing directions, but with the same destination in mind. Robin pulls the cloak over her hair, white and ethereal in the night, brighter than her own, and makes for the southern edges of their devastated town. The stars bear down upon them both. The _Book of Naga_ sparks to life, humming with energy.

The end of her life... A sweep of her hand sends another pack of Grimleal scurrying away from the crushing weight of her holy tome - or is it unholy to them? She isn’t a follower herself, but she likes to think Naga has consented to help her, at least for now, as a thanks of sort. For spiting Grima, perhaps.  

The air is burning, the smoke thick in her lungs. She remembers the day she escaped the sanctuary, and the unimaginable heat she’d experienced. The high, stone walls opening up and unfolding a world before her - and here, out in the open, the way the stars bear down upon them even in moments like this, when all the world ought to be cringing away - and she remembers the exhilaration of freedom.

Her legendary tome seems to take a mind of its own, twisting and spinning throughout the air, a crescendo of wind and light that shoves all away in its frantic path. Even still, as soldiers continue to bear down, without fear of death or maiming, her magic grows weaker. Arrows and shortaxes begin to breach her defenses.

The end of her life, huh...? She feels, rather than sees, Robin slip away from the fighting; sees the three crumpled bandits that'd been guarding the outskirts left in her daughter's wake. 

As Validar approaches her in her weakened state, it becomes impossible to bite back her wicked grin.

One last spiteful action...she’d say she deserves it, after the sort of life she’s lead. Naga, supposing she does take in the souls of those who aided her in life, will forgive a moment of pettiness, won’t she?

Validar approaches, scorn ready to fly from his lips, a lecture about inevitability or betrayal, perhaps - but she, for the second time in her life, does not give him the satisfaction of taking what is _hers_.

The wind in her chest seems to flutter around her heart until, almost delicately, it envelops the thing. Her last hope is that wherever her little bird may be, she has the wind at her back, pushing her along. To keep moving, and see as much of this world as is possible in a single lifetime.

To remain free, even as fate itself attempts to restrain her.

..............

...............................................................................

.............................................................................................................................................

“What are you doing out here so late, Robin?”

Rather than turn her head to look, like a responsible person might have, Robin leans back until she gets a good look at the source of the voice - Sumia - before flopping the minimal distance to the ground.

Amused, the now upside-down pegasus knight looks down. Robin shoots a grin up at her. “Just laying around.”

“Do you think - er, is it alright if I join you?” Hesitantly, Sumia looks to the space beside Robin, who, for her part, sits up and nods.

“Of course. Sorry if I’m a bit quiet, though.”

“Oh, are you -” Sumia seems to get stuck on something, drumming her fingers against the sand like it’ll jog her memory. “What’s that thing Chrom always says..... Fighting with unhappy thoughts? Um, that doesn’t sound quite like it....”

Robin laughs, a short breath. “It’s the same sentiment. And no, I....wouldn’t call them unpleasant. They’re just thoughts. It’s more of a conversation with myself than a battle.”

Sumia cocks her head. “But you _did_ come out here to think? Oh, pegasus dung..! I knew you were busy...if you wanted some peace and quiet, you could have just said -”

“It’s fine! It’s fine, really, Sumia.” She reassures, hands out in a gesture intended to placate the other girl.  “Frankly I was starting to talk myself in a circle, so I could use the company. It’s....reassuring. So please. Sit out with me a little longer?”

Now calmed, or at least mostly so, Sumia nods, settling into her place a bit more. The two are quiet for a moment, although eventually Sumia turns her head skyward and lets out a soft sigh. “It’s really beautiful out here at night, don’t you think? The sky is so clear. It feels like it never ends.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.” Robin agrees, lifting a hand to run it through her hair, comb some of the sand out of her twintails. The sight does strike something in her - the endless stream of stars on a clear night, pitch black above the sands of Plegia, and that same wave of _something_ she’d been ruminating on earlier hits her once again.

She clenches her fingers around a fistful of her jacket. “...Sumia? You know, the last time we were out here was for the war with Gangrel.”

“Yes.....it feels like it’s been ages since then, though.” Sumia says with a thoughtful expression, turning her head from the stars to look at Robin. “Is that what you were thinking about?”

“Kind of.” Robin replies, turning towards Sumia with an almost guilty expression. “I was thinking about the night after we...lost, our first attack.” Even still, the memory of her failure burns her; she should have planned better, should have anticipated - a horde of risen archers, summoned from nothing - why didn’t she think of that? Why didn’t she have a contingency plan for archers? She could have paired the royal guard with knights, given them tonics, something, anything - Emmeryn’s fall, graceful and silent, was heard for miles. It’s her fault. Even though it isn’t, she could have done _something_ different, surely.

She looks up again, because if she doesn’t she might just cry thinking about it. “...We were all crammed into Basillio’s wagons for our escape. Chrom and Lissa were inconsolable about Emmeryn, still. I remember telling them she became a star, because that’s what I always hear people say in Ylisse.”

Sumia hums her agreement. “It’s a popular saying. I like to think it’s true, too. The thought that even after we can’t see them anymore, all the people we’ve loved are still with us....it’s comforting, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Robin replies honestly, finally releasing her hold on her jacket. The tattered thing seems older than she is, sometimes, but it's never fallen apart, even taking it into battle all the time the way she does. It's a comfort, possibly the last comfort, she has left over from Before Chrom. Pity she doesn't know how she came into owning it. “I don’t....I don’t have anyone like that. So sometimes I worry I said the wrong thing to them, because I can’t find anyone in the stars myself. Not even Emmeryn, even though I’ve tried it.”

Wistfully, Robin searches the sky with prodding eyes. “Sometimes I think I spot something familiar here, but it’s gone too fast to really know. I wish I could just get a little closer to that feeling, and then I’d know...know if I said the right thing to Chrom...know if I can apologize to Emmeryn...know if, I ever -” She catches herself on her own breath, and realizes she’s teary-eyed. “If I ever had anyone that’d be up there to look for...”

But it’s no good. She can’t remember a thing. Parents, siblings, neighbors.......she can’t remember anything before Chrom. What if she was _alone?_ Could she really have lived like that?

Impulsively, Sumia reaches over and pulls Robin to her side. “Of course you did! Just because you can’t remember doesn’t mean _they’ve_ stopped caring about you! Snap out of it, Robin!” Calling to mind the last time Sumia had uttered the words ‘snap out of it’, Robin wonders dimly if she’s going to have to dodge a closed-fist slap (or, in other words, if Sumia is going to knock her out with her good intentions) but thankfully this time the girl is intent to shake her, not slap her.

The memory of Chrom’s bruised cheek does get a laugh out of her, though. Probably not the reaction Sumia intended, but it did well enough to cheer her up. Robin wipes her eyes with a soft laugh. “I didn’t realize I was so self-centered.”

“I - I’m sorry!” Flustered, Sumia all but shoves Robin back to the place she’d been sitting before, and scoots away herself for good measure, face buried in her hands. “I know it’s, n-not really my business...I don’t know what I was thinking, so I’m really - gahhh...” Defeatedly, Sumia leaves her face covered.

“It’s okay. That was actually really comforting, in it’s own way.” Robin gives Sumia’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, lest she let the poor girl combust from the embarrassment of it all.

Even as she does that, she trains a searching eye on the stars, waiting for that one familiar spark to stand out. When she spots it, she closes her eyes.

‘ _Whoever you are, even if I can’t remember you......thanks for waiting this long.’_

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand end! This has been a WIP for such a long time that finishing it now seems like a massive relief, ahah. Even though I was pretty eager to wrap it up, I'm proud of how it turned out! big shoutout 2 my pal banditchika for wading thru it before it was Polished and tbh big shoutout to anyone whomst clicked on this... i see ur a reader of Family Fic........a comrade........a reader in arms........ dkjgshjkgh thanks for reading my minor character melodrama bonanza I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> ps: idk why but lately ive really been Feeling robin and sumia together?? I just think they're cute and like books? soft. they're soft together. that being said you can really interpret their relationship however you want because there's essentially nothing romantic whatsoever actually written into this fic: the meat is ALL on that amnesia/incredibly loving, but equally dead, caretaker angst lmao


End file.
